Zadie Smith

Courtesy/Penguin Books

Author Zadie Smith

Author Zadie Smith

(Courtesy/Penguin Books)

Nov. 3

If we had to pick our two favorite Zadie Smith lines, they'd be the "Howard's End"-riffing intro to her third novel, "On Beauty," which begins "One may as well begin with Jerome's emails to his father" (the line in E.M. Forster's 1910 novel is "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister"), and this one thing she said in a review of 50 Cent's performance in his autobiopic, "Get Rich Or Die Tryin'": "My brain is giving you one star, but my heart wants to give you five." This fall, Smith brings that kind of interdisciplinary understand and wit to Hopkins for the President's Reading Series. Presumably, she'll focus on some things from her most recent novel, the fractured political novel, "NW." 6:30 p.m., Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Campus, Hodson Hall, Room 110, 3400 N. Charles St., free. (Brandon Soderberg)